In the film "The Shape of Water," the story of Eliza Esposito and the sea creature she falls in love with teaches us that you don't need to speak in order to truly love and understand someone.
Eliza, an orphaned mute woman who works as a cleaning woman for a government laboratory in Baltimore discovers what love truly means when she encounters a mysterious sea creature that the government discovered in South America. Being mute, she feels as though people always look at her differently, and never truly understand what she means.
She lives above a theater and spends a great amount of time with her closeted neighbor Richard Jenkins, who is a struggling artist. Up until meeting this sea creature, she had never been truly understood until then.
The sea creature behaved violently towards the employees at the lab, even ripping off the fingers of the main antagonist, Colonel Richard Strickland. Until he meets Eliza, who offers him an egg, and teaches him sign language while eating lunch next to his enclosure in the lab each day.
The two develop an unspoken language, where they bond over music and learn sign language. Finally, Eliza has found someone who doesn't see what she lacks and accepts her for who she is completely.
However, the lab wants to kill the sea creature, and when Eliza finds out about the plan, she gets help from Jenkins and her coworker Zelda, as well as Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, the scientist who observes the creature and also wants to keep it alive.
They manage to help the creature escape and take it back to Eliza's apartment where she takes care of him. They further their relationship and discover that the sea creature has healing powers. However, Strickland discovers that the creature is being housed there, and plans to kill anyone who had a part of stealing it, and the creature itself.
However even though he attempts to kill them all, the creature protects them and kills Strickland, and he and Eliza escape to the sea, where we assume they lived together forever.
The real theme here is that communication is endless, you don't have to speak in order to understand people for who they are. There are boundless ways to speak without words, and I think people forget that there doesn't always have to be a conversation. Silence is just as loud as words.
